Threat of Deportation Haunts Immigrant Students

More than 100 Austin parents, teachers and community members gathered at Mendez Middle School Saturday for an immigration forum sponsored by the teachers union, Education Austin. Advocacy groups and organizations provided information to undocumented immigrants about a pathway to citizenship and the latest on immigration reform.

It's a process that advocates say can stress out many parents. But it can be a stressor on children as well.

Esmerelda Rodriguez is one of those children. She emigrated from Mexico right before starting sixth grade at Mendez Middle School.

“It was really hard, Rodriguez said. "I [could] only speak one language. Me starting school without knowing English, it was really hard.”

She and her parents are undocumented. As a child, she says she feared her parents would be deported. Now, as a 19-year-old mother, she fears what could happen to her daughter if she is deported.

“I have to find the help so I can stay here with her. It makes me actually scared to lose her," Rodriguez said.

She wants to get paperwork to work legally in the U.S. as a beautician.

Rodriquez’s story is common among those who turned out for the immigration forum.

Leonore Vargas is a Family Resource Specialist at Mendez Middle School—where student enrollment is 90 percent Hispanic. She says it’s difficult to know the specific number of students who are undocumented or have undocumented family members, but she says the threat of deportation has an obvious effect.

“It creates a lot of stress on children and families, we’ve seen depression, increase, sometimes, in suicide, kids who don’t eat because they’re so depressed, kids with anxiety, or even just some fear of every time ‘is my parent going to be home or not be home?’ That, of course, affects them academically," Vargas said.

In 2011, 49 percent of Mendez Middle School students passed all standardized tests. That compares to the rest of the district, in which 75 percent of students passed.

Julieta Caamano is a bi-lingual Kindergarten teacher in Austin. She attended the forum to learn what to tell undocumented parents who are looking for answers about immigration. She says even some of her kindergarten students are aware of the threat of deportation.

“We had some visitors and we have a police officer and they were like, “oh, is this la migra, teacher?’ They have stories about a sibling or someone in their family that they had to go back to their country," Caamano said.

Vargas says the fear continues as undocumented students get older.

“What we see is a student who is not a U.S. citizen experiences a higher level of stress fear, continuous stress and fear, and always being hyper-sensitive of not getting in trouble at school, for fear it might bring attention to the family that is unwanted," she said.

Miguel Gutierrez is working on a study at UT’s School of Social Work to learn the mental health effects of a Mexican parent’s deportation on U.S.-born children. Parents and children fill out surveys and participate in interviews.

"I’ve seen cases where house re-modeling are left on hold, children expressing anxiety about their other parent being deported if they arrive late, 15-20 minutes, they express ‘where were you? Where have you been?’ So there’s a heightened sense of anxiety and depression," Gutierrez said. "It’s one of the things we’ve seen and we’re trying to understand that and hopefully create a more humanitarian immigration policy."

Westlake High School students will get their diplomas at the Erwin Center tonight. Three other high schools have graduations scheduled there on Saturday: Hendrickson High School (9 a.m.), Pflugerville High School (11 a.m.) and Connally High School (1 p.m.).

Alumni from Johnston High School, now known as Eastside Memorial High School, are voicing concern over the likely takeover of their former campus by John Hopkins University. Austin ISD signed a contract with Johns Hopkins as part of a state-mandated effort to revive sagging test scores at the school. But Texas Education Commissioner Michael Williams still has to approve the plan, or shut down the campus.

Lt. Governor David Dewhurst is putting distance between himself and Governor Rick Perry over in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrants in Texas. He said this in a TV news interview with Dallas’ WFAA.

"If we're not going to give fellow Americans who live in Louisiana or Oklahoma or New Mexico the ability to come into Texas and have in-state tuition and save, then is it fair to give that break to people who are not citizens here?" Dewhurst told WFAA said. "I would not have signed that law."